Living Story Grace

A long, wonderful day at PCA General Assembly, lots of good conversation with women hungry for the good news of God’s story of grace really is written in individuals, community, and cosmos. As I mentioned yesterday, little time to post this week, so we are in a series of re-runs. Today and tomorrow, my Valentine’s post from this year. A repeat we all need to hear again I think.

God melts the iciest heart, even mine

Today, a Valentine about the best love we’ll ever know, the only one that won’t disappoint. I wrote this two years ago, and though some of the circumstances have changed, the only steadfast assurance is that while I continue to fail in my vows, our God never wavers.

I’ve done it again. I’ve broken my vows. I just turned my husband down for a date because it was easier to say ‘no’ to him than figure out how to get my daughter to volleyball and my son to piano. Having recently led a marriage conference, my vow to ‘forsake all others’ is fresh on my mind. In preparation for the conference, I reviewed the vows I purportedly recited on my wedding day. I confess that in the fog of lace and love, I don’t actually recall saying these, but witnesses tell me I did. I promised to love and comfort, honor and protect my husband, forsaking all others and being faithful to him as long as we both should live.

I didn’t remember the words – I had to google them; that fact in itself reveals a certain lack of attentiveness. And I have to be honest, as I read them, I shook my head in disbelief that I would ever utter them aloud. Not because they’re not lofty goals that seem in line with the Biblical understanding of what living out love in marriage should look like, but because I should have known I could never keep them.

The fact is, I’m a vow breaker. More honest vows for me would have run like this: Kip, I promise that every day of our married life I will fail you. I will put my needs before yours because I want to feel good about myself. I will fear disappointing my parents more than I fear disappointing you, so I will arrange our family’s schedule around their wishes at Christmastime. I will be too busy or too tired for sex on a regular basis, and whatever I do, I will NEVER EVER wear that lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. Now these are some vows I could keep (sigh,have kept).

This probably would have made for a most UN-romantic wedding, but it would have reminded us of the TRUE story of marriage which the Bible tells.

In Scripture, the story of marriage goes like this –

I hit the road at 5:30 a.m. for PCA General Assembly — very excited about connecting with people who are excited about learning, living, and loving in the gospel…So this week’s posts will be hit or miss…here’s an oldie from the archives, calling us to consider how the way we were created affects the way we live.

“You are not allowed to hit your sister.  It goes against everything you were made to be.  God called you as a man to protect women, to honor them and fight for them.”
So went a diatribe I oft-repeated to my eldest son when he was about 4 – 7 years old and he had a tendency to pick on or even hit his sister, two years younger than he.

One afternoon, when he was about 13, he asked me to sit with him.  He had a story to tell me. He had intervened in a friend’s self-destruction.  Noticing how thin she was becoming, he asked her a few questions and learned that she was eating very little.  He looked up eating disorders on the internet and realizing that her behavior was serious, he confronted her about it and insisted she tell her parents.  She agreed, but asked him if he would be there with her when she did so.  As he finished the story, he said, “Well, I just wanted you to know because her parents might be calling you.”  After he told me, I sat stunned for a moment by a 13-year-old boy’s courage and boldness in fighting lovingly for a woman’s beauty.

How we live is directly related to how we were created.  Though I could have just told my son that he couldn’t beat his sister up “because I said so,” I explained why he couldn’t do harm to a woman – because as a man, he simply wasn’t created that way.  When we understand how God created the world and us, we live boldy in the story of grace written into us.

As I sit in the corral gate of the Phoenix airport, I hear a child calling to its mother and turn, expecting to see my dear friend’s daughter…but of course, I left her at her house, sleeping.  Last night, introducing my dear, now-35-year-old friend, whom I met when she was a 15 – yr-old babysitter, grew into a ‘daughter,’ and then evolved into a true friend, I realized how truly precious it is to have friendships that span almost a lifetime. What a gift. So, as we are close to boarding, I offer some Charles Spurgeon quotes on friendships.  Spend some time today thanking God for your friends and asking God to make you a better friend.

“The vanity of all friendship which is not found in true principle, was never more
plainly expressed than in an honest, but heartless, sentence of one of Horace
Walpole’s letters. “If one of my friends happens to die, I drive down to St. Jame’s
Coffee-house, and bring home a new one.” The name of “friend” is desecrated in a
worldling’s mouth—but there is a friend. FA85

A friend to everybody is often a friend to nobody. PT34

If we would always recollect that we live among men who are imperfect, we should
not be in such a fever when we find out our friend’s failings. PT66

Anger against enemies must not make us forget our friends, for it is better to
preserve a single citizen of Zion, than to kill a thousand enemies. TD70:4

One heart in two bodies is the realization of true brotherhood. TN123

The friendship of bare compliment is the fashion of this age, because this age is the
age of deceit. 120.109

We are one in Christ; let us be friends with one another; but let us never be friends
with one another’s error. If I be wrong, rebuke me sternly; I can bear it, and bear it
cheerfully; and if ye be wrong, expect the like measure from me, and neither peace
nor parley with your mistakes. 250.204

And first let us learn to set loose by our dearest friends that we have on earth. Let us
love them—love them we may, love them we should—but let us always learn to love
them as dying things. 349.10

There is one thing about the usefulness of which all men are agreed, namely,
friendship; but most men are soon aware that counterfeits of friendship are common
as autumn leaves. 899.613

Lip-love, proverbially, is a thing to be questioned; too often it is a counterfeit. Love
which speaks can use hyperbolical expressions at its will, but when you have heard
all you can hear of love’s speech, you are not sure that it is love; for all are not
hunters that blow the horn, and all are not friends who cry up friendship. 1128.470
Men in going through the world make many acquaintances, but out of these they
have few special objects of esteem, whom they call friends. If they think to have
many friends, they are, probably, misusing the name. 2091.339

Any man can selfishly desire to have a Jonathan; but he is on the right track who
desires to find out a David to whom he can be a Jonathan. 2336.567″

www.mapthespill.org

Few people spend a day with me without hearing me use the phrase, “restoring broken things.”  I LOVE hearing stories of people who are doing life restoring broken things.  Yesterday I heard a firsthand report from one of the men working on “mapthespill.”  Read this excerpt from Scotty Smith’s Restoring Broken Things, and the short story to follow:

Adam and Eve were to release the hidden potential of the earth through tilling, planting, tending, harvesting, preparing the fruit, enjoying the fruit of their work, and praising God from whom all blessing flow. This cycle would naturally lead to the development and expansion of many other aspects, avenues, and artifacts of cultural advancement in areas such as relationships, governance, ethics, technology, economics, art, and education.

Filling Our Stomachs or God’s Earth?

BUT … Adam and Eve’s act of unbelief and rebellion in the Garden of Eden changed everything. Sin invaded the hearts of God’s creatures and permeated every sphere of God’s creation. Instead of filling creation with God’s glory, man’s glory became filling his own belly. The apostle Paul lamented, “Their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame” (Philippians 3:19 niv). The pleasure of worship was displaced with the worship of pleasure. Men became “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:4).

Instead of cultivating God’s garden, men began exploiting his creation. Humble dominion became selfish domination. Ruling as servants under the Lord was replaced with ruling over people as self-appointed lords. The “keeping” of stewardship disintegrated into the hoarding of ownership. Instead of building the global New Jerusalem, men began building the godless city of Babylon. But God did not abandon his creatures, creation, or his decree for culture-making. He promised, through the work of the Messiah, to break the curse of sin and death, reconcile his fallen children, restore his broken creation, and to redeem the fractured history of culture-making.

Indeed, the “filling” of all things is still the number one item on God’s agenda because it includes the completion of the Great Commission as well. For the fulfillment of the Great Commission is nothing more, and nothing less, than the gathering of the trans-generational, pan-national family of God into the New Jerusalem. It’s culture-making in the global city of the new heaven and new earth to the glory of God in the joy of God!

Now, for the story.  I arrived in Phoenix Wednesday to visit a dear ‘daughter’ and longtime friend and her family.  That was the same day the oil spread its full thickness on the shores of MY home beach, Pensacola.  When I saw the photos late Wednesday afternoon, I wept.

Then, Kris, Gina’s husband, came home. He told us what he’d been doing at work that day — talking to both BP execs and Nature Conservancy folks — about a new application for mobile phones called “Map the Spill.” Yesterday, he told me about talks with the Nature Conservancy and how at the moment they have many wonderful volunteers mapping the spill by ‘hand’ –i.e. filling out reports and turning them in.  This app allows anyone, you or I, to track and report spillage through their mobile phone.  I smiled as I heard him describe it (and believe me, despite my paltry explanation, it’s truly amazing), because it was a “restoring broken things” moment. As I told him, “It gives us the opportunity to participate in the restoration.”  For me, it was a sure sign of hope in this broken world that, as Scotty says, God has redeemed, is redeeming, and will one day finally perfect our broken hearts and this broken creation.

http://www.mapthespill.org

“So, my dear family, this is my appeal to you, by the mercies of God:  offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.  This is your true and appropriate worship.  What’s more, don’t let yourself be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age.  Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out and approve what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable and complete.”  Romans 12:1-2

I learned this verse many years ago, in my early Christian days.  Sadly, over the years I think I marginalized it in my vigilant battle against “works-righteousnesss.”   In his book, After You Believe,  N.T. Wright writes about this strange happening in all camps of contemporary evangelical Christianity, reminding us that THINKING is a necessary and essential part of growing as a Christian.  Listen to how he says it:

“Part of the problem in contemporary Christianity, I believe, is that talk about freedom of the Spirit, about the grace which sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low-grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in the culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are, the less you need to think.

I cannot stress too strongly that this is a mistake.  The more genuinely spiritual you are, according to Romans 12 and Philippians 1, the more clearly and accurately and carefully you will think, particularly about what the completed goal of your Christian journey will be and hence what steps you should be taking, what habits you should be acquiring, as part of the journey toward that goal right now. Thinking clearly and Christianly is thus both a key element within the total rehumanizing process (you won’t be fully human if you leave your thinking and reasoning behind) and a vital part of the motor which drives the rest of that process.” P. 158